Sample User Journey

Paid Follower User

Persona 1	Emma is a Computer Professional. She is 28 years old and lives in Stockholm. She has a medium income. She has a hectic daily schedule on weekdays. She wants to learn Yoga to enhance her body flexibility and strength. She wants to improve her energy levels and work on her positivity.
Context	Using the app on a mobile device or desktop at home
Pain Points	●     She can’t set apart a time slot for learning it herself from her daily schedule as she lacks accountability. ●     It is too much of an effort for her to find a good Yoga and Meditation class near her house. ●     She also has budgetary constraints. ●     She wants to do classes only on weekends.
Goals	Learn simple yoga postures and breathing techniques in a month. Improve flexibility to go to the next level in yoga. Do guided meditation to relax her mind and improve her positivity. Get motivated to start practicing on her own.
User Expectations	Simplicity of creating and selecting a challenge Ease of registering for a challenge Participants using tools like videos, images, instructions, fellow users’ participation etc. Clarification of doubts and correction in technique wherever required by asking questions in the community, posting pictures/videos. Ease in tracking and completing a task Completing the tasks and achieving the goal successfully Earning a Reward in return
Process	She comes across the XYZ app. She finds the idea of taking up a challenge, learning on the way and achieving a set goal interesting. She downloads the app on her phone. Once installed, the app shows her a short demo of how she can go about selecting a challenge and then achieving her goal. Signs up for free to figure out how all this works. After signing up, she comes to the challenges page. She searches for a Yoga and Meditation challenge. The list shows her a number of challenges created by different coaches. She selects a challenge posted by coach on the basis of: Goal of the challenge Difficulty level of the challenge Duration of the challenge Fees for the challenge Popularity of the coach: has a significant number of followers on Social Media Reward for completing the challenge Location: Stockholm Makes the payment for the challenge and joins it Goes through the posts created by the coach and fellow participants (Instructions and tips) to progress through the challenge Watches videos and photos posted by the coach Tracks her progress by posting: Videos Photos Logging in time/task completed Completes the goal May or may not get a reward Gains confidence and learns a new skill by completion of the goal

Paid Coach User

Persona 2	Shawn is a professional photographer. He is 30 years old and lives in Malmo. He has medium income. He does professional photo shoots and also conducts photography workshops to teach others. He now wants to create a Vintage Photography challenge. He needs a free mobile platform to organize it. Participants will be able log in their progress in the app and at the end of the challenge Shawn can decide upon the winner.
Context	Using the app on a mobile device or desktop at home or workshop
Pain Points	●     He can’t keep a track of everyone’s progress manually. ●     He has budgetary constraints. ●     He finds it difficult to inform participants about the challenge and motivate them to join it.
Goals	Create a challenge that a large number of people can participate in. Encourage people to try their hands on photography and join his workshop. Use the word-of-mouth publicity of the challenge to increase his popularity as a photographer.
User Expectations	Simplicity of creating a challenge Ease of setting tasks and goals Declaring a reward Ease in using tools like videos, images, text messages to give tips to participants and also interact with them. Ease in tracking incomplete and completed tasks
Process	He comes across the XYZ app. He likes the idea of getting a platform for creating a challenge and setting up goals for participants. He downloads the app on his phone. Once installed, the app shows him a short demo of how he can go about creating a challenge and then setting up tasks and goals. Signs up for free to figure out how all this works. After signing up, he comes to the Create Challenges page. He creates a Fitness Challenge. He then gets an option to share the Challenge link with his Contacts to join the challenge. He categorizes the challenge on the basis of: Goal of the challenge Difficulty level of the challenge Duration of the challenge Reward for completing the challenge Goes through the posts created by the participants Posts videos and photos and also views those posted by participants Tracks users progress by viewing the time/task completed View the list of participants who have completed the goal May or may not declare a reward Generates publicity for himself as well as on social media platform to rake in more clients

Microsoft Flow & Office 365

Are you someone who is always on the move and have made the shift to using cloud-based apps to handle your business? Do you spend a lot of time doing repetitive tasks like, saving important file attachments you receive from your clients on Outlook 365 to your local hard drive? Do you need to track files that are being added to important folders by other team members? Do you want to receive a notification when a very important client emails you, but are busy coordinating tasks with team members on Slack?

You can automate these repetitive, everyday tasks and start paying attention to other important tasks. Microsoft Flow helps you do just that by linking different cloud-based apps, collecting data from them, synchronizing files, sending you notifications, and carrying out many other tasks. MS Flow works on the principle of setting up a trigger to initiate an action. The linked apps talk to each other when a particular trigger goes off and then perform the specified action. For example, your clients might be tweeting feedbacks about your brand using a particular hashtag. It is important to you to track them and keep a copy of the same in your database for sentiment analysis later. You can thus, use Microsoft Flow to create and automate a workflow that will put a copy of each tweet with that hashtag in the database every time a client tweets, without any intervention of a developer. This automated workflow is called a flow.

Apart from using MS Flow to improve your productivity by getting automate routine activities, you can also use advanced integration tools such as LogicApps to create API connectors and gateways for custom solutions. Once you set up a flow, you can use the Microsoft Flow Admin Center to manage the flow from a desktop or a mobile device. As an admin you can manage users, their permissions, roles, etc. The various apps and services that you can link with MS Flow are Office 365, Dynamic 365, PowerApps, Dropbox, Facebook, OneDrive for Business, Salesforce, Twitter, SQL Server, and many more.

Features of Microsoft Flow

MS flow helps you to:

• Create flows to get notifications, manage your flows, and trigger manual flows
• Use different connectors to exchange data between SharePoint and various MS and third-party services.
• Create new items and documents and also update them in SharePoint Online. Also send notifications for it.
• Creating custom APIs
• Use Twilio to support text messages
• Use flow mobile app for iOS or Android
• Use blob storage, resource manager and DocumentDB in Azure services and connect to PowerBI
• Create environments, manage permission and set up Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies using the Microsoft Flow’s Admin Center
• Introduce more workflow features in Office 365 and Dynamics 365
• Save hashtag tweets on a SharePoint list.
• Create CRM entities based on the SharePoint list
• Ease sharing of files in between SharePoint and OneDrive, Dropbox and SharePoint

MS Flow for Businesses

MS offers you some really useful tools to make business operations more efficient and use the available resources in the best way possible. These tools are Office 365’s cloud services, PowerApps and Flow. PowerApps helps you to build web and mobile business applications using templates without requiring you to write complicated codes. You can create apps that are customized according to different departments such as accounting, sales, customer service, administration, and HR. It helps you to develop mobile apps so that your business can improve processes like providing estimates, providing support to customers, etc. 

Industries of different domains such as manufacturing, IT, pharmaceuticals and energy can really benefit from using MS Flow to streamline their business processes and reduce the efforts and time spent on routine tasks. One of the reasons why these organizations find it difficult to find a solution to such common problem is the cost and complexity of deploying software systems. Thus, MS Flow comes across as a good choice to simply sign up and use.

Getting Started with MS Flow

To give you an overview, MS Flow provides you with a number of templates that you can use right away to create a workflow. You can choose from different types of templates for data collection, sending a notification, using social media, improving productivity, using mobile devices, etc. If you can't find a template that is suitable for a task, you can create a customized workflow.

So, to start using MS Flow, you first need to sign up to Microsoft Flow, subscribe to MS Office 365, get a web browser like Chrome or Safari and an email Id. If you don’t have a Microsoft account yet, you will have to create one using your existing email id.

Logging in on MS Flow

If this is the first time you are using an online Microsoft product, you will have to sign up for MS flow at flow.microsoft.com. You can sign up for free here by entering your email address. If you have been using online Microsoft product, simply sign in using the same email address as you use for other products.

Once you sign up, you can start using the free plan for MS Flow. If you want to use additional features that come with the paid versions, you can opt for Microsoft Flow Plan 1 or Plan 2. if your organization has already subscribed for Office 365 or Dynamics 365, then you automatically get access to these additional features on MS Flow.

Creating a Flow Using a Template

Once you log in to MS Flow, the Start page is displayed. It displays a list of templates that are available. You can choose to create a new flow using any of these templates with a ready-made flow. You can also learn more about MS Flow from this page.

Now, you can select the template according to your requirements. Here, we have selected the Get updates from the Flow Blog template. This takes you to the next page where MS Flow will connect the RSS feed of the MS Flow blog to send a push notification to your mobile device every time a new blog is posted. Both the RSS and notifications will be logged in with your Microsoft account. You now simply need to click on the Create Flow button to create this flow.

Creating a Flow from blank

If you can't find a template that suits your needs, you can create a flow from the scratch. Click on the My Flows tab and then select the Create from blank option.

You are then taken to a page from where you can create a flow from blank. You can either chose to learn more about doing so or directly try creating one. It also lists the most popular triggers that you can use to create your flow. You can begin by clicking the Create from blank option on this page.

This opens up a page where you can select connectors and actions to create your flow.  Here, will create a flow to send us an email on Office 365 Outlook every time a modification is made to a file in the Document folder on OneDrive. Thus, we have selected the OneDrive connector and the action as sending an email to Office 365 Outlook.

Once, we select the action as Office 365 Outlook - Send an email we need to login to Office 365 Outlook to connect it to our flow and simply click the Create Flow button to create this flow.

Customizing TPZ Control Settings for Surveillance Cameras

A Pan-Tilt-Zoom or a PTZ camera is a special surveillance camera that can move horizontally, diagonally and vertically to keep the target centered in the field of view. It can also zoom in on the target to get a better view. This is especially useful in case of detection of faces or licence plates, etc. in large areas. Once the target moves out of the range of the camera, the camera zooms out and goes back to its previous setting.

The Smartlens software helps you in configuring a PTZ camera. It also helps in recording the captured video on a personal computer, a disk drive, USB drive, a memory card or other forms of mass storage.

A few things that you should keep in mind while setting up a PTZ camera are:

• Turn off motion detection for the PTZ cameras to avoid the DVR from detecting the pan and zoom function as motion and triggering an alarm.
• Make sure that the PTZ camera is connected properly to the DVR.

Some important things about the PTZ camera settings on the Smartlens software are that:

• It displays the blue arrows on the border of the surveillance area in case a camera has all or even some of the pan tilt or zoom features. 
• In case of a few cameras, the actual movement of the camera can be in the exact opposite direction of the arrow that is pressed.

To control the PTZ camera with the Smartlens software you need to first open the SmartLens camera software. This will open the main application window.

On the main application window, on the Control Panel, select the Manage tab. This takes you to the ManageCamera window.

The ManageCamera window shows you the cameras that have been added for monitoring. Here, we have added the Microseven and the NETCAM cameras. To control the TPZ features of the camera, select the desired camera from here. Here, we have selected the Microseven camera.

Once you select a camera, the window displayed below opens. Here, there are 2 tabs. The Options tab and the Motion Detect tab. The Options tab is displayed by default.

You can use the blue arrow buttons displayed over the surveillance area window to move the camera horizontally, diagonally or vertically to adjust the view.

You can use the buttons with the plus (+) sign or minus (-) sign to zoom the camera in or out, respectively. Originally the camera is centred and zooms in or out at a speed depending on the time for which you press the sign buttons. The zoom slider displays the length for which the camera has been zoomed in or out.

OneNote vs Evernote

OneNote vs Evernote: Which is best for your business?

Are you someone who likes to jot down things to keep their thoughts organized? Does your work demand taking notes or making to-do lists regularly? Do you like to list down short and crisp points to elaborate on in project meetings? Then you must have come across two of the most popular note-taking apps available today – Ms OneNote and Evernote. Both these apps have free versions and come with some very useful features, but each has some pros and cons that set them apart. While some users swear by using Ms OneNote, others prefer to use Evernote. Let’s discuss both according to their features to help you decide which one is better for your business.

OneNote vs Evernote: Notes creation

Ms OneNote has the traditional MS Office Ribbon that provides you with many features to create, edit, view and organize notes. While creating notes, you can add text, images, tables, video and audio files, spreadsheets, links, etc. into your notes. This helps in creating content rich notes and keeping all the media objects associated with them in one place.

You can take freehand notes and draw freehand images using a touch-capable device or a Microsoft Surface device. The usual MS office formatting and reviewing options help to create more appealing and accurate notes.

Evernote includes most of these notes-creation features, drawing and editing tools, but doesn’t provide some OneNote features like reviewing the edits of others. Finding information or notes can be a little overwhelming here if you don’t tag them properly. Unless you tag your notes, they will keep piling up in a messy way and will be difficult to look for later.

OneNote vs Evernote: Organization of Notes

OneNote helps you to organise content just like you would do in a real-world notebook, in the hierarchy of notebooks, section groups, sections and pages. This provides you with simple and broad cabinets to save your notes in. Pages in a section are displayed in a list on the right-side panel, that helps you keep a track of topics that you have created. OneNote also helps you to organise content within your page by creating sub-paragraphs. You can create multiple paragraphs under the top one and collapse and display them as required.

Evernote organizes notes is a linear way. Evernote displays all the existing notebooks on the extreme left side of the screen. While scrolling through these notebooks you can see the list of notes in it and image clippings from those notes. As the name suggests, the All notes section displays the entire collection of notes taken till date, irrespective of the notebooks they are in. Evernote provides a Tags options under the listed notebooks where you can search for notes according to their tags.

OneNote vs Evernote: Clipping from the web

OneNote has a clipper add-in that has very basic functionality and that can only be used from a Microsoft account. Using this clipper, you can grab a screenshot of the webpage or a region. You can choose to capture an article from a webpage, excluding the advertisements. You can also capture its bookmark.

The clipping gets embedded as an image. It allows you to include this clipping only inside an existing notebook. If there are any multimedia components on the clipping or any link, you will not be able to use them in OneNote. It also doesn’t not allow you to copy a saved clipping to other applications, such as Ms Word.

With Evernote, you can do all this and choose to exclude the original format of the article and copy just the text and images from it. You can create a new notebook to add this clipped information and use it markup tools to include comments or note down questions. You can also play around with the content from the clipped page by editing or changing its appearance. You can add text to it, highlight it and even draw on it. Unlike OneNote, the links of the clipped page remain clickable in Evernote. You can also view videos embedded in it by clicking them and visiting the original webpage from where it was clipped.

OneNote vs Evernote: Usage on different devices

Both OneNote and Evernote can be used across devices, but the overall look and feel many vary from device to device.

Being a part of Ms Office, OneNote works the best on Windows. It provides you the entire range of note-creation and formatting options in this version. You may find a few of these features missing in the Web version, iPad and the Mac versions of OneNote. Though the Mac version has all the formatting features just like the Windows version, it doesn’t provide you with as many Insert features. The iPad version also has its limitations though it provides an extra feature of taking a picture from its camera and inserting it in your notes. The iPhone and Android versions are also simplified versions and give some features a miss. They allow you to scroll through notes easily and take quick notes on the go.

Out of all the different devices, Evernote also seems to look and work the best on Windows. It is easier to organise your notes on Windows as existing notebooks are displayed vertically. This task becomes a little tricky while using an iPad or Mac. If you use the Android or the iPhone version, Evernote displays notes in rectangular boxes with the note title and image displayed on it. While using the web version, you need to click the Notebook icon to see the list of existing notebooks. You can then click on a notebook to see the notes in it.

OneNote vs Evernote: Using third-party apps

When it comes to using third party apps to import content, both OneNote and Evernote work well. Applications such as Onetastic, Genius Scan, IFTTT and Zapier help you to easily bring information on to OneNote, where you can edit and organize it according to your needs. In case you want to export your notes to other apps, OneNote allows you to do so easily with Ms office products, specially Ms Word. You can also export your notes to a spreadsheet or a PDF documents.

Evernote is very versatile in this regard as it supports many apps across different platforms over different devices. For example, if you need to convert recorded audio notes into text on Evernote, you can use the Dragon Anywhere app with it. Evernote also supports other useful apps like TaskClone and Cloudmagic. But, if you export your notes to other apps, Evernote doesn’t provide you with as many options as OneNote does.

OneNote vs Evernote: Pricing

The notes that you create using OneNote are synced with all the devices and the Web using Ms OneDrive. When you purchase an on-premise version of Ms Office, you get 5GB of storage on OneDrive. Whereas, if you subscribe to Ms Office 365, depending on the version you select, you get 1TB to 5TB of storage space. Here are the different prices for OneDrive and Office 365 subscriptions.

OneDrive for Business Plan 1	OneDrive for Business Plan 2	Office 365 Business Premium
$5.00 user/month	$10.00 user/month	$12.50 user/month
1 TB of OneDrive storage per user Create and edit Word, OneNote, PowerPoint, and Excel documents from a browser with Office Online	Unlimited OneDrive storage Enables real-time co-authoring in desktop apps like Word and PowerPoint, etc.	Includes email, Office applications, and services like OneDrive Includes all OneDrive for Business Plan 1 benefits and more

The free version of Evernote provides you with limited storage space of 60 MB every month and doesn’t include all its features. Advanced features that help you convert your notes to presentations, search for content in inserted attachments and PDF files in notes, etc are available in the Premium and Evernote Business versions. You can checkout the pricing for these versions here.

Free	Premium	Evernote Business
Free	$69.99 per year	$120 per user per year
Upload 60MB of new notes a month with limited features	Upload 10GB of new notes per month	Upload 20GB per user + Shared 2GB per user

Conclusion

Deciding on whether to use OneNote or Evernote while taking notes thus depends on which features are you looking for. While OneNote is very handy to use to jot down notes from scratch, Evernote comes across as a better choice when you need to grab content from a website and analyse and organize it.

Users who prefer to keep their notes clearly organised in different sections rather than in a linear format would find OneNote more helpful over Evernote.

As far as pricing is concerned, you may want to go with the Windows version of OneNote that comes bundled with Ms Office, rather than spend on Evernote that provides you the entire range of features only in its paid versions.

In case you work on different projects like writing minutes of meetings, blogs, books, research, etc, where your needs keep changing, it is handy to keep both with you and take advantage of both worlds.